returning home, he boarded a flight
to Mumbai to study with another spir-
itual guide. He took a room in a mod-
est hotel and went to daily satsangs,
spiritual discussions, at the apartment
of Ramesh Balsekar, a former presi-
dent of the Bank of India and a teacher
of Advaita Vedanta, a Hindu disci-
pline. Cohen read Balsekar's book
"Consciousness Speaks," which teaches
a single universal consciousness, no
"you" or "me," and denies a sense of
individual free will, any sense that any
one person is a "doer."
Cohen spent nearly a year in Mum-
bai, calling on Balsekar in the morn-
ings, and spending the rest of the day
swimming, writing, and wandering
the city. For reasons that he now says
are "impossible to penetrate," his de-
pression lifted. He was ready to come
home. The story, and the way Cohen
tells it now, full of uncertainty and
modesty, reminded me of the chorus
of "Anthem," a song that took him
ten years to write and that he recorded
just before he first headed up the
mountain:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect o ering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
Even if he was now freed of de-
pression, the next crisis was not far
o . Aside from a few indulgences,
Cohen was not obsessed with luxury.
"My project has been completely di er-
ent than my contemporaries'," he says.
His circle in Montreal valued mod-
esty. "The minimum environment that
would enable you to do your work with
the least distraction and the most aes-
thetic deliverance came from a mod-
est surrounding. A palace, a yacht would
be an enormous distraction from the
project. My fantasies went the other
way.The way I lived on Mt. Baldy was
perfect for me. I liked the communal
life, I liked living in a little shack."
And yet he had made a consider-
able fortune from album sales, con-
certs, and the publishing rights to his
songs. "Hallelujah" was recorded so
often and so widely that Cohen jok-
ingly called a moratorium on it. He
certainly had enough money to feel
secure about his two children and their
mother, and a few other dependents.
Before he left on his spiritual ad-
ventures, Cohen had ceded nearly ab-
solute control of his financial a airs
to Kelley Lynch, his business manager
for seventeen years and, at one time,
briefly, his lover. In , however,
he discovered that his accounts had
been emptied. Millions of dollars were
gone. Cohen fired Lynch and sued her.
The court ruled in Cohen's favor,
awarding him more than
five million dollars.
In Los Angeles County
Superior Court, Cohen
testified that Lynch had
been so outraged by the
suit that she started call-
ing him twenty, thirty
times a day and inundat-
ing him with e-mails, some
directly threatening, even-
tually ignoring a restraining order. "It
makes me feel very conscious about
my surroundings," Cohen said, accord-
ing to the Guardian's account of the
trial. "Every time I see a car slow down,
I get worried." Lynch was sentenced
to eighteen months in prison and five
years' probation.
After thanking the judge and his
attorney in his usual high style, Cohen
turned to his antagonist. "It is my
prayer," Cohen told the court, "that
Ms. Lynch will take refuge in the wis-
dom of her religion, that a spirit of
understanding will convert her heart
from hatred to remorse, from anger to
kindness, from the deadly intoxication
of revenge to the lowly practices of
self-reform."
Cohen has never managed to col-
lect the awarded damages, and, be-
cause the situation is still a matter of
litigation, he does not like to talk about
it. But one result was plain: he would
need to return to the stage. Even a
Zen monk has to earn some coin.
T irresistible
about Cohen's charm. For proof,
take a look at a YouTube clip called
"Why It's Good to Be Leonard Cohen":
a filmmaker follows Cohen backstage
as a beautiful German-accented ac-
tress tries to coax him, in front of a
full dressing room, to "go somewhere"
with her as he wryly rebu s her. He is
no less charming with men.
So it was more than a little surpris-
ing when Faggen and I returned to
the house one afternoon thinking that
we were on time and were informed,
in the sternest terms imaginable, that
we were not. In fact, Cohen, wearing
a dark suit and a fedora, settled into
his medical chair and gave us the most
forbidding talking-to I have experi-
enced since grade school. I'm one of
those tiresome people who are rarely,
if ever, late; who show up,
old-mannishly, for flights
much too early. But there
had apparently been a mis-
understanding about the
time of our visit, and a text
to him and his assistant
seemed to have gone un-
seen. Every e ort to apol-
ogize or explain, mine and
Faggen's, was dismissed
as "not the point." Cohen reminded
us of his poor health.This was an abuse
of his time. A violation. Even "a form
of elder abuse." More apologies, more
rebu s. This wasn't about anger or
apology, he went on. He felt no rage,
no, but we had to understand that we
were not "doers," none of us have free
will. . . . And so on. I recognized the
language of his teacher in Mumbai.
But that didn't make it sting any less.
The lecture---steely, ominous, high-
flown---went on quite a long time.
I felt humiliated, but also defen-
sive. In the dynamic of people getting
something o their chest, the speaker
feels cleansed, the listener accused and
miserable.
Finally, Cohen eased into other
matters. And the subject that he was
happiest to talk about was the tour
that began as a means of restoring
what had been stolen from him. In
, he started conceiving a tour with
a full band: three backup singers, two
guitarists, drummer, keyboard player,
bassist, and saxophonist (later replaced
by a violinist). He rehearsed the band
for three months.
"I hadn't played any of these songs
for fifteen years," he said. "My voice
had changed. My range had changed.
I didn't know what to do. There was
no way I could transpose the positions
that I knew." Instead, Cohen tuned the
strings on his guitar down two whole
steps, so, for instance, the low E was
now a low C. Cohen had always had
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2016
57